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Honestly, this is not really commonplace, at least not on the PC platform (no idea about console). There is only a handful of games I seen that sold cheatey DLC's (and with cheatey, I'm thinking of godmode esque cheats). Where does the idea that it's common came from, rose tinted nostalgia glasses?

Cheat codes are a bit less common sure, at least game specfic ones. Some games still got a dev console you can use, but it's usually engine rather than game-specfic cheats.

Unfortunatly it's kinda buggy in some ways after playing it with six-seven people. Crashes and desyncs galore, and regular multiplayer hosting is actually stabler.

It also crashes if it's started without a steam login, but it doesn't care who is logged in (so it can be a alternative account that dosen't have Civ 5). This could be a regression introduced with a patch at some point (it probably tries to do a callback with the steam API and fails).

C compilers aren't well served by having GUIs, but IDEs are well served by compilers being libraries since it makes accurate and consistent analysis possible. If an IDE continuously uses compiler-like logic all the time anyway and has several files pre-parsed and in a known state, compilation can happen faster by not having to start over from scratch every time. And that's before we get to real semantic/static analysis and refactoring assistance.

GCC has been usable as a component in making some stuff happen, but as the OP pointed out, it was an explicit goal of RMS's to not make embedding too easy lest someone bake in the smarts without going whole hog GPL.

L4D, L4D2, Alien Swarm, Dota 2 and Portal 2 are in their own separate forks. You can see this if you poke around the file structure of Steam, and look for the dependencies for the various games.

The most used fork is still "Source 2009" which is basically just the Orange box era Source upgraded with Mac support. They constantly port features between forks as needed though, and sometimes remains from other games is in the wrong fork (I still spot TF2 console variables in Portal 2, unused). The most significant part about Source 2009 is how it still have dx8 support for legacy hardware, while that was dropped in the forked engines.

Interestingly, it might be worth to mention that Counter-strike Source used to be updated along Source 2009, but they stopped as a general engine update that usually came with the regular TF2 updates could sometimes be a nuisance for competitive CSS players.

Publishers can choose to make the non-windows version a whole separate application steam-wise, meaning that you have to pay for a copy for each platform you want to play on. Thankfully, this seems to only be the case with Black ops so it's more of a exception than a rule (and I hope they keep it that way too).

One of those two projects I helped fund so that it ended up happening at all, and in the second of them I said that I was willing to order something, so that they could negotiate the right kind of price and put up enough money to start production.

Not sure when "funding" or "capitalism" became "begging for handouts", or when "asking a thousand people collectively" became filthier than "asking one bank".

As someone who's currently reaping the rewards of both projects I sponsored on Kickstarter, I reject the insinuation that many or most Kickstarter projects are frauds.

There are crooks everywhere. Kickstarter, by making it easier for people to collect money, makes it easier for those people just as much as the legitimate users.

I understand where their position on refunds comes from even if I probably wouldn't be very happy about being in that situation. It's up to local law enforcement to deal with fraudsters, and as long as they've done reasonable due diligence (to the extent that they even can), I wouldn't be more comfortable if they suddenly had more power available to them.

I think you read more into "implausible" than I do. Implausible just means not probable and is a relative term. Saying that we are circling around a giant nuclear fireball is "implausible" if you rewind human history enough, but it can be proven by observation once you figure out that stars are not celestial monuments of the dead but large nuclear reactors and that everyone's made up of parts of dead stars. You're right that there's nothing objective that you could point to to say that the idea of God is something that seems implausible, but is actually true, and in this way it is not science. However, I don't see why noting that is flamebait.

I said God to mean the idea separate from religion that means a higher power that controls, created or interferes with the universe or its building blocks. If you say that just outside of all that we can perceive and measure, there's a guy named Thor with a big hammer, I don't think it's possible to prove that or disprove that, because it's built into the concept that he would then be immeasurable. (Don't worry, this doesn't mean that I think he does exist either, or that people that assert it is right.) For all I've heard, this is the argument that's actually being made whenever someone defends the idea of a God.

Utter bunkum. Science has nothing at all to say even about dualism let alone about God because it (intentionally and by convention) only speaks to the material, while the "rationalizations that support the concept of God" have never been mere questions about how the material has changed from state to state.

Which definition of God have you heard that includes there being something that you can actually prove about it? Everything I've heard is inference of causality. X, therefore God exists because Y. Y is never objectively universal, X is often flimsy and the connection is never explained or defined.

The constant droning about imaginary tea cups is a bare faced straw man

Thus why I said "attempts". Just like everyone carrying the idea of God doesn't have a united front, there are people coming at it from all sides with varying arguments of varying quality. Doubting the existence of a tea pot doesn't disprove God, but it's supposed to illustrate that you don't have to assume that God does exists just because someone holds it on faith. Where it really falls down is that you actually could find the tea pot, whereas no one ever produces anything that unambiguously, to widespread agreement and without fail would prove the existence of God.

The way people "believe" in infinite universes is probably fraught with misuse too, but if there was no way of holding a working hypothesis in your head temporarily in order to work from it to build a model that could be tested, there would have been a lot less scientific progress.

Science can't disprove God for the same reason that God can't be proven, but it can remove many of the rationalizations that supports the concept of God in the first place. What's left is something very implausible that you deliberately have to take on faith. The constant droning about imaginary tea cups in orbit (or not) around the moon are attempts to demonstrate why the same arguments wouldn't fly with anyone if you just changed the case from religion to something else that can't be proven. Without historical and cultural context, there's no reason to believe anything on the same premises other than simply wanting something to be true.